COLUMN: Football Is Crazy, Football Is Mad

<p>I’m sorry to be a gay stereotype but football bores me senseless.</p> <p><a href="http://www.thegayuk.com/ChrisBridges">by Chris Bridges</a> | 15th June 2014</p><p></p><p>I’ve never seen more than a few minutes of any sports match and I don’t intend to change that now. For the duration of the World Cup I’ll be avoiding the TV and newspapers (it seems to have pervaded everything, even Google has football themed graphics). I’ll definitely be staying out of any pub that has a huge flag draped outside and a television the size of a standard door. I’ll be wincing at pound shop nylon flags draped on cars or people wearing face paints. </p><p></p><p>My family weren’t sports viewers and we grew up without the presence of competitive sport anywhere in the house and with a healthy disinterest in people running round in rash inducing nylon. Surely there are more important things to put your competitive energy into like fighting for the right man, a good place to live or the killer job. I’ve sustained the disinterest and taken it to a slightly higher level (i.e. hatred of all sports). I just don’t get why people become such fanatical crazed monsters. My worst public transport nightmare isn’t the slurry drunk or the youth playing music and spitting. It’s the two men avidly discussing sport and becoming increasingly shouty and loud as their tempers and passions rise. I feel like I may as well be hearing a Martian language for all the sense it makes to me.</p><p></p><p>I see the appeal of football for some gay men: men in skimpy shorts frolicking about on a field. That can be found elsewhere though. Why bother watching the game? Just take it to another level and search for one of the multitude of sport related porn flicks on the Internet. At least you don’t have to watch the dull bit and the action is more interesting than a few men kicking a ball to each other. If you’re unlucky the film will have a ‘plot’ a.k.a. a couple of South Londoners shouting across to each with lines they’re reading off a card whilst they ineptly kick a ball just before the shower scene when the fellatio starts.</p><p></p><p>Last night I was kept awake till the early hours. I don’ t know what the result was but they were either happy/sad/angry/elated/disappointed. It seems to translate into the same way: drunken people shouting at 2am. I love that people have a passion but what the fuck? I get very excited by literary awards but you don’t catch me running down the High Street shouting about them in the small hours. It strikes me that sport lacks decorum at times. </p><p></p><p>I can waffle on for hours about things I hate, like orange skinned W.A.G.s, bizarre hairstyles and hideous tattoos. I can bemoan overpaid dunderheads and managers in car coats. Let’s maybe just leave it that football is not my thing and I can choose to avoid it and will try really hard (except when I’m in the supermarket, looking at social media, in the street, at work, reading the news, on the train or anywhere out of the house at all when I can’t avoid it all as it’s being rammed down my throat). If you need me for the next month I’ll be in isolation with a pile of books and a pot of coffee or maybe partaking of my own particular sport: competitive complaining and griping. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p> </p>